A lot of interesting questions raised in this reply. To begin, I have to ask: why is it publishers' responsibility to make an e-reader a smart consumer choice? They don't, after all, produce the things. Large corporations that sell ebooks do: Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Apple, to name the three most popular. These corporations are the ones with an interest in getting consumers to go digital, and practices like aggressive cost-cutting after wholesale (esp. by Amazon) exist in order to get people to switch from print to digital within a specific company's ecosystem.
Is it really shocking that private for-profit companies would be concerned about the bottom line? This is, essentially, why they exist. Not that this would justify absurd profiteering at the expense of product--but as it happens they are not reaping in massive wads of cash right now. The "big five" (ex big six) are in turmoil, as it happens, and mark my words, there's much more trouble to come.
True - it's not their responsibility to promote e-readers, but that's not really the issue. What they have to do is
adapt to the
existence of the e-reader, and the customer expectations that go along with that new technology. I would argue that they haven't done that - and ultimately, it's the customers and their expectations that determine whether any business succeeds or fails.
And, as you say, publishing is a business. Businesses exist to make money
by providing something that people want or need. I absolutely agree that the publishers are trying to protect their bottom line, but that doesn't make them worthy of our support - or justify their existence in and of itself! If publishing cannot find a way to make the people paying for their work happy, they're ultimately going to die out because other businesses (e.g. Amazon) are figuring out how to do what they can't.
Fair point. But library sales would be affected by the death or further limitation of the hardcover.
I'll admit at the outset, I don't know much about how the library sales system works, so I might be missing something here. But I'm assuming if a hardcover is produced and the library system would normally buy it, that would happen regardless of whether the ebook had been released. And if less hardcovers are being produced overall because the ebook alternative means that there is less demand for them, it still comes back to the fact that publishers need to satisfy real consumer demand, not artificially create it. It can't be counted as a 'loss' if it's something not enough people wanted to buy in the first place.
And to be honest, if anything changes, I'd be much happier if publishers started distributing a greater share of income to writers.
Agreed; I think as the creators of the work, traditionally published authors get a pretty raw deal of it at the moment. But unfortunately as you noted, with the tight profit margins they're experiencing, I doubt that it's going to happen.
I don't think this is a great analogy. When itunes came around, it gave the option of downloading individual songs instead of albums. That offered, essentially, a return to a previous economic form--the era of the single. And things like spotify are economically viable because people listen to songs over and over and can get paid on a per-played basis.
Ebooks, by contrast, are typically consumed once and aren't so easily divisible (though you can do chapter-by-chapter stuff, and to that end, I'd be curious to see how Scalzi's The Human Division did). That means the publishing industry lacks the flexibility in the move to digital that the music industry enjoyed (and continues to enjoy).
Fair point, it's not a perfect analogy - I meant it more as a general example of how the music industry initially struggled to recognise the importance of new technology, and then failed to embrace it for many years.
Still, my larger point was that as the landscape changes, publishers need to adapt to changing customer expectations. The entire system is becoming decentralised, so they no longer have a monopoly in which they can just impose their will against consumer demand and expect it not to hurt sales. If they do, all that will happen is that authors getting caught up in the mess will more seriously consider jumping to self-publishing as an option.
Now, don't take this to mean that I think publishers shouldn't experiment--they should. And a lot of ebooks are released at the same time as hardcovers. I just don't see why this is a pressing issue, how it's healthy as a general strategy for publishers, or why it should be considered on par with other stuff Sullivan raises, like eliminating DRM (which restricts ownership rights and privileges) or fixing ebook territory restrictions.
Honestly, it's a pressing issue more for publishers than it is for readers - because in the next few years, they're going to have to start justifying themselves to savvy authors who realise that their sales are being damaged by these sorts of things. Strategically, it's important because what they're doing at the moment is seeking short-term profit but causing long-term damage - they're setting themselves
against digital distribution, when that's clearly the future. The danger in that is that by the time they decide to fully embrace the ebook system, that same system may have decided/realised that it no longer needs them.
So they really do need to pay attention to how they treat ebooks - their goal is to profit, but their money-makers are the authors, and their customers are the readers. The authors want ebooks released simultaneously, because they want the widest possible audience and because they want their readers to be happy (yes, even above a slightly larger profit). The readers want ebooks released simultaneously because of convenience, price, and because it's not an unreasonable expectation in today's digital society. So if publishers want to continue to stand up against all of that and risk alienating pretty much everyone who makes them money - especially when there's a viable alternative to their services... well, good luck to them!
